On not quite belonging

Here’s a thoughtful post from Bibliotropic about being an ex-pat (She’s British and living in Canada):

That’s the thing about being an ex-pat, I suppose. It’s so easy to feel like you have two homes and yet none. That you’re torn between heritage and upbringing, that anything you remember about before just holds you back from adapting to now, even when you’ve been out of that “before” place for decades. Assimilate or flounder, and oh, by the way, you’ll never really assimilate. At best, you’ll pass. If nobody looks too closely. And nobody questions why you’re using the wrong country’s term for something.

It’s worth reading the whole thing, and worth keeping in mind if in your writing you have a protagonist move from one country to another, like Trei in The Floating Islands We see that situation in fantasy pretty often, it seems to me.

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